“Let me get you a drink, Mr. Holland,” he said.
“No, thanks. I’ll make this quick. Someone has created some serious problems for my family. My son received a scholarship which he sorely needed, only to discover he wasn’t eligible. Then I got stung on a bail deal for two hundred thousand dollars. Yesterday the brake-fluid line on my truck was cut and my wife almost died in the Blackfoot River.”
“I’m sorry to hear all this. Sit down.”
“I’ll stand, thanks. My purpose is to tell you neither my wife, my son, nor I have anything you want or need. We don’t know the whereabouts of the files stolen from Global Research or even who stole them. We are of no value to you or people who might work for you.”
He listened respectfully, nodding, taking a sip from his whiskey and soda before setting it down. He held his eyes on me, then began. “The research facility I own here is involved with genetically enhanced food production. Nothing else, sir. Our goal is to end starvation in the Third World. But for some reason probably known only to God, a bunch of fanatics have targeted my company as the source of all evil in the world. I don’t begrudge them their point of view, but I’d at least like to have a dialogue with them before they decide to burglarize my businesses and characterize me as the Antichrist.”
“Leave us alone, Mr. Mabus.”
He sat down on a couch even though I was still standing, his eyes searching the air as though he could not find the proper words to express his frustration.
“Long ago I stopped trying to sort out all the ethical complications that accompany the operation of a national or global enterprise,” he said. “Today, my standard is simple: I protect myself from my enemies and try to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people possible and make an acceptable profit at the same time. Occasionally, that means doing business with people like Emile Asahari. You know who he is, don’t you?”
“No,” I replied.
“The third biggest independent arms dealer in the world. He provided over two million Chinese-manufactured AK-47 rifles to rival factions all over the Mideast. On one occasion, when he thought a particular regional war wasn’t being prosecuted vigorously enough, he paid a bounty for human ears. His business boomed. Sixty Minutes did a special on him.”
“Not interested.”
“You should be. Emile gets along very well with a lot of people in our government.”
“I had my say, Mr. Mabus.”
“You went in the little bedroom off the library, didn’t you? Don’t bother explaining. You went in there to use the bathroom. Your hands are still a little wet.” He jabbed his finger at me, his face breaking into a grin. “Got you again, didn’t I?”
“You sure did.”
He got up from the couch. “That bedroom looks like it was transported from a Marseilles whorehouse.” He started laughing. “But the house came like that. It was built for a notorious Hollywood sex freak who blew out his doors with speed he cooked down from diet pills. Come on, lighten up. The guy screwed every starlet in the business, then canceled his own ticket because his stomach was so big he couldn’t see his schlong.” He laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. “Anyway, that bedroom is scheduled to be remodeled next week. In the meantime, don’t leave here thinking you’ve just visited a theme park for sex addicts. I’m a decent guy. In fact, you may be looking at the next governor of Montana.”
When I left, he was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. As I drove back toward the highway in the fading light, the wheel lines blowing haloes of water spray above Karsten Mabus’s pastures, I had to conclude that he was perhaps the most engaging man I had ever met. I also believed absolutely nothing he had told me.
THAT NIGHT, while we slept, someone cinched a vinyl garbage bag over the head of my buckskin gelding and let him run himself to death in the darkness.
Chapter 17
I REPORTED THE GELDING’S DEATH to Darrel McComb in the morning. He looked wired, distracted, his hands too busy on top of his desk. “You don’t have any idea who did it? An angry client, maybe some guy you defended on a traffic ticket who ended up in Deer Lodge?” he said.
“You think this is funny?”
“I’m on the desk, if you haven’t noticed. I can’t do anything for you.”
“You’re a good cop, Darrel. You’re the one guy in here who can help me.”
He twisted a pencil between his fingers. Two wire baskets filled with traffic reports and time sheets rested on his desk. He wore a starched white collar that was biting into his neck. He pulled at his collar and glanced through the opening in his cubicle. “Romulus Finley wanted me to get rid of Johnny American Horse for him. I thought it was because he wanted Johnny out of Amber’s life. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Get rid of him?”
“You heard me.”
“Go back over that. You’re not sure about what?”
“I thought Finley was bent out of joint because his daughter was the regular hump for an Indian. But I think the real deal is the break-in at Global Research. I got played on that, too.”
“By whom?”
“My own Johnson. I’m going to lock it in a vault.”
“Greta Lundstrum played you?”
“No, guys like me get to sleep with Sharon Stone. You really blow my head, Holland.”
I WENT DOWN to the Federal Building on East Broadway and tried to talk to either an FBI or an ATF agent and got nowhere. But I wasn’t surprised. All the personnel there knew I had been Johnny American Horse’s attorney, and right now, in their mind, he was not only the man who had killed Seth Masterson, he was taking on the supernatural properties of a mythological hero at their expense.
There were many stories about Johnny’s elusiveness. He was seen everywhere and nowhere. Some speculated he had died from a fall or hypothermia high up in the Missions or from drowning in the Tongue River Reservoir. A trucker said an Indian fitting Johnny’s description had hitched a ride with him over Lookout Pass into the old mining-and-brothel town of Wallace, Idaho, then hooked up with a gang of bikers on their way to Sturgis, South Dakota-in the opposite direction. A rancher who raised buffalo as commercial beef by West Yellowstone, hundreds of miles away, claimed he’d seen wolves tearing apart a cow in his pasture. When he drove his truck at them in the darkness, blowing his horn, a man in a loincloth, his body streaked with blood, had separated himself from the wolf pack and raced into the woods, a torn haunch over his shoulder.
That same night a bartender in Missoula swore Johnny came into his saloon, drank for an hour, settled his tab, and left in a taxicab.
It was obvious the Feds were tracking Amber’s movements in order to find her husband. She showed up in Lame Deer, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, buying canned goods, dried beef, cases of diet soda, a secondhand saddle, coils of rope, rifle ammunition, and a set of animal traps. She drove her Dakota all over the Custer National Forest, pulling perhaps a dozen agents out of the Billings area with her. Meanwhile, one hundred miles away, Johnny walked out of the bulrushes on the Little Big Horn River, ate lunch with an Indian farm family in Garryowen, then swung up on a freight train headed back west over the Grand Divide.
My favorite story about Johnny and the authorities’ pursuit of him involves a Crow Indian named Half Yellow Face, who was a descendant of one of Custer’s scouts at the Little Big Horn. Half Yellow Face was a seasonal firefighter and packer for the U.S. Forest Service who could look at a hoof scratch on a dry rock and tell you the size and weight of the animal that had put it there and exactly where it had gone. Johnny had been spotted at the head of a canyon in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, then bottled up and sealed off by federal agents and Flathead County sheriff’s deputies. Half Yellow Face was helicoptered in by the FBI to ferret out Johnny’s hiding place, although he was not told the name of the man he was supposed to find. The road leading into the canyon was lined with government vehicles, the blades of helicopters thropping overhead, agents with scoped rifles and caps inverted on their heads resting by the roadside.